Recent reviews by gak

This ain't Civilization. The whole strategy comes with placing buildings within proximity to other buildings that synergize with it and away from buildings that lose value from it in order to have a positive net value and establish that site. It's like finding a location with a dowsing rod. You can rotate and snap buildings into position for maximum density or however you may want it to be presented for aesthetic purposes as the goal of the game doesn't always need to be to attain the highest possible score out of a given island. Once you've adequately drained an island out of more possible growth (or you've run out of points to spend and can't get any more but you've fulfilled the gauge to fo the next island), you can just take a screenshot and move on to decorate a new one where you would either be given an even more variety of buildings to play with or be put into a scarce situation where you must make ends meet to travel to the next island in order to continue the run.

There are no builders, rulers, researchers, or anything that forces you to wait for things to complete or turns to pass. The game gives you everything you would want to do at your fingertips and you can take it as slow or fast as you want it, as well as pause/resume, quit/return at any time without punishing you for it.

Mouse-only gaming is possible too, you don't need a keyboard. You can't accidentally place anything while dragging the map, so you needn't take unnecessary precautions or anything and even if you do place something that didn't snap into place correctly, you can undo one step back with a full refund and no consequence.

The natural way these cities form abiding by the value-count system is fascinating; mansions are closer to city centers while houses are further away, so circuses end up in the outskirts of cities which creates a gradient of poorer folk as they get further away from the city centers while jewelry stores being closer to mansions has gold mines near them (like the California gold rush, where richer people built their homes on Gold money) If you leave gaps in between cities, temples will be very profitable later on.

Just like with Superflight, they had a great and honest trailer to explain what their hyper-casual game is all about without needing to show you a flashy montage because those who do usually just have a product that's more style over substance.

Sonic Generations celebrates the history of Sonic by bringing back no more than 3 games from each era with no more than 1 level from each of them. Regardless of what era they came from, every level has 2 Acts: a 2D Classic-Sonic version and a 3D Modern-Sonic version (specifically using the recent Boost-era mechanics)

Physics and Collision is a bit finicky (not sure if it's the Hedgehog Engine or Havok implementation), especially with an unguided boost. Sonic relies on strong ground traction while using boost in order to prevent you from flying off the level which is mainly why mid-air boosts can't be held much longer than with the dash you get when pressing A again after a jump. Speaking of which, the main difference between a mid-air boost and a dash is basically a bit more momentum versus more precision and consistency respectively. The game really doesn't want you to boost much in the air which is why all gaps and ledges are filled with auto-trajectory hoops (the Red and Rainbow rings), Trick-pads, and bottomless-pit signs in order to basically warn you that fighting against the level design in those sections may lead to certain death.

A triple-A Sonic game can't be compared to Mario anymore, it still sticks to an arcade-y approach like Super Monkey Ball and isn't ambitious like Mario Galaxy which came 4 years prior. Sonic was always meant to be a disruptive less-linear game than Mario with its high verticality, but in the transition to 3D, Sonic just flopped and ended up becoming the lesser experience. But Generations has shown us that Sonic doesn't need to overcompensate with an open-world gimmick or anything and can survive with its arcade roots and speedrunning focus. Even if its levels feel uninspired and iterative of its previous entries, it's still lauded as the best modern Sonic game long past future entries. It sometimes falls into the Chibi-Robo Ziplash syndrome where everything feels like it was made in a block-based level editor but all the Modern Sonic acts give you a sense of speed with platforming that even similar-genre games or Racing games didn't provide back then.


When the levels aren't level-edited blocks, they are decent-looking European Towns or structures that you blaze through without getting a good look at anything, much less screenshot it. The best Zones were all the city levels followed by the tropical-themed ones followed by the blocky levels. Hearing non-chiptune renditions of all the tracks helped me lend an appreciation to the synergy between arcade games and rock music. It gets a bit old with how the intensity is never dropped throughout the level, but it does give it a 1up for repeat listens on MP3 later on.

It's a linear game with deviating paths that lead back to the main branch every time, and staying on the higher floors without making many mistakes doesn't grant you a better path to the finish unless you count getting all the Red Rings in one go as a better run than if you had to play the level 5 times for each ring. The 60fps lock makes it uneasy on the eyes even with/without Vsync cause everything is supposed to go so fast... so instead of a higher framerate, we are smeared with motion blur. it's too easy to get an S rank even with a hundred mistakes as long as you don't die (which is hard to do since you maintain a couple of rings even after getting hit (but you still can if you're glitched out or go off a ledge). The game loads levels in less than a second with an SSD, and after hearing about Sonic 06's case, I'm glad I didn't have to deal with something like that every time I had to retry a level or side-mission.

If Sonic Mania's final boss fight was Omega Flowey (Undertale Neutral Ending), then Generations' final fight was the true pacifist ending with Asriel where all friends come together and cheer on while the 7 colored-heart souls represent the 7 Chaos Emeralds of course.

Most side mission gimmicks never overstayed their welcome apart from the doppelganger races... which got really annoying as they posed no challenge yet force you to play the vanilla level again but with an inconsequential husk that can't catch up to you.

But finally, why is it called a Sonic Generations Collection on the store page when it's just the base game + a really small mini-game? Cause it's Spinball baby and Sega won't ever let you forget its existence in Sonic's legacy for some reason. 28 rupees at -95% off was a steal though

Journal:

The first widescreen 2D Sonic I played (before A.I.R.), and I have to say the extra screen real estate does help out my reflexes in choosing the right paths and avoiding obstacles, especially with the smoother framerate compared to the Genesis Classics emulator.

There are more frames on all sprites and effects overall, making this game impossible to have worked on a Genesis, so this is more like the spiritual successor to Sonic 3&K if it were on Sega Saturn if Sega weren't hell-bent on transitioning him to 3D. It's understandable they did that because the first 5 games came out within very few years of each other and there may have been Sonic fatigue, but they didn't even give him a chance on Saturn.

Staying on the upper floors gives you the feeling of superiority since you're most likely there when you've made no mistakes and hence you deserve to get through the fastest. But sometimes the bottom of the level will have most of the gimmicks, puzzles and interesting things going on.

The soundtrack is less pop and more jazz-oriented with a lot of vocal splurges making everything sound more eventful and exciting (compared to the Genesis games, which sounded very pop-rock thanks to its composer and sound chip respectively) It almost feels like the Mario Odyssey of Sonic games, one game to replace them all; the &knuckles expansion taken to a whole other level.

Encore is crazy. Usually, you only have Tails as the side character but seeing the AI of other characters do random stuff out of your control (which are different from what Tails does) is fun to see. I ended up playing only as Sonic and never tried any other character in other Sonic games (except for Knuckles once in 3&K), but Encore forced me to shuffle and try every character from the 2D Sonic Line-up and appreciate their different playstyles:

• Mighty can't get damaged when in ball form (even from spikes and projectiles) and can ground-pound.
  
• Ray can glide like Mario with the cape in Super Mario World.
  
• Knuckles can climb walls with traction and glide like The Super Acorn in nsmbU and he does damage while gliding unlike Tails and Ray when they use their power thanks to his dreadlocks.
  
• Tails can fly anywhere by spamming A and can swim anywhere by spamming A. The area where his tails spin does damage but it's hard to not get hit after the rebound that he faces after bumping into something or trying to change his flight trajectory.
  
• Sonic has also been given some exclusive abilities to finally stand up against his fellow pals. Only sonic can use the drop dash, has a unique Super Form, gets to use the active powers of the elemental shields, etc. They gave him parts of these in Sonic 3 itself to differentiate himself from the other characters, but Drop Dash and additional elemental shield effects are quite an upgrade from Insta-Shield and the flickering shield sprites from Sonic 3. Since Sonic is meant to be the fastest one, along with making drop-dash exclusive, they even nerfed Knuckles' jump in order to not reach the heights at which most bosses reside to make balance out each character and have their difficulty ratings align with Tails being Easy, Sonic being Normal and Knuckles, Ray and Mighty being Hard Mode.
  

The main reason why Drop Dash is amazing is that charging spin-dash normally has you not moving at all/stop moving completely and then start spamming down-A, otherwise you just lousily roll, but in Mania, you just need to jump, adjust yourself onto a flat surface and vroom! (only possible without roll-lock though)

Y is used to switch characters in Encore mode, but jumping and then pressing Y turns each of those characters super. I'm just disappointed that Knuckles and Tails can't go hyper like in Sonic 3 (and apparently that isn't considered Canon anymore) Tails could've become some form of the Nine-Tailed Fox during his super phase instead of repeating what Sonic 3K did but without the flickies.

In encore mode, the color pallet change is cool on some levels while a bit nasty on other levels. Don't get me wrong, it still looks amazing, but you'll know what I mean once you compare them side by side. You can get your lives/characters back without the TVs by entering the special stages at the checkpoints and winning them back at Sonic Spinball instead of entering Blue Spheres in Mania mode. After you're done with all the Blue Spheres in Mania mode, you'll get the Spinball Bonus Stage there as well.

For Mania Mode, I collected big rings from different levels/locations each time because I didn't know you could just repeat the same one over and over again once that save has completed the game. For Encore I just kept doing the one in Green Hill with Mighty and Tails. As every reviewer said, these are by far the best special stages in a Sonic Game because of their speed, non-laggy inputs, and variety between all 14 pre-determined stages (after the DLC) which you'll be presented based on difficulty, and not RNG.

The final battle reminded me of Omega-Flowey from Undertale to a certain extent. The flicky capsules flying in from the top remind me of the key coming down in New Super Mario Bros. Wii after finishing a castle.

There might be something called Blue Sphere fatigue after playing both Sonic 3 and Mania at the same time, but I'm glad it was Blue Sphere instead of Sonic 1 or 2's special stages. The added framerate for the sprites makes everything look more fluid in the game, but we have to thank the Retro Engine for the manageable special stages even though it does get stressful when the speed increases with the laggy input/turns (still far better than the Genesis Classics Emulator). In the Blue Sphere stages, you'll end up getting a Silver Medal even after you have the rings available for you to collect because the level ends once all the spheres have been accounted for. With careful planning though, I was able to get gold medals on all of them by retrying them over and over again for 10 hours straight in debug mode, making sure to omit at least a few spheres until I have collected all the rings. (I didn't have the luxury to quick save/rewind like in Sonic 3k)


Zones:

Since I was playing the Genesis Sonic games at the same time as Mania, I couldn't help but notice how much of the literal level layout was copied into Mania with a few refinements and remixes at best. This is more of a package to replace those titles than a follow-up. Even one of the only 4 original zones has an entire act of it be based on Sky Chase Zone from Sonic 2 (even though it isn't as pace-breaking as Sonic 2 because it mixes things up with a train section).

There's 1 Sonic 1 level, 2 Sonic 2 levels, and 3 Sonic 3 levels in Mania and all of these are relatively faithful to the source but have gimmicks and references from omitted levels and other sources fused into the zones even if said gimmick didn't exist in its original state.

Whilst the levels from Sonic 1, 2, and 3K were great to begin with and all they needed were some increased frames, Sonic CD's best stages were ported here with much-needed flair and are two of my favorite remixes in terms of level design and music. Getting rid of the Time-Travel gimmick was the right choice as a linear flow to the climax was much better suited for Stardust Speedway to fight Metal Sonic and for Metallic madness to fight Eggman respectively. The Metal Sonic fight acting as the mid-way point helped keep expectations of its grandiose to a limit (unlike Sonic CD which teased the fight so much to the point that the hype overshadowed the actual relevance of the encounter)

In terms of the Chaos Emerald ending, Egg Reverie is a much better Doomsday Zone clone compared to Time Eater in Sonic Generations as the former made you feel powerful and tensed at the same time, while the latter was slow and frustrating.

Journal:

Sonic 3 introduces cool powerups like the Fire Dash, Double Jump, Ground Pound, etc. along with elemental effects to the pre-existing shields, taking the physics exploration to the next level while not being tied to a permanent movement modifier, has an SRAM module in the cartridge to save your game progress that they nailed right in their first implementation, has multiple playable characters with unique ways to interact with the levels, and is also the world's first game to have a physical DLC that transformed it into a complete experience.

Sonic has been praised for its simplicity. In Sonic 1, they had all face buttons make you Jump and that was pretty much it. In Sonic 2 and CD, they still had 1 button do everything but utilized the Dpad along with it for new actions present in the sequel like Spindash and Peelout. In Sonic 3 you had to; press it to jump, hold down and spam it to charge a spindash, hold up and spam it to charge a peelout, press it while in the air to trigger the respective elemental shield's power, press it while in the air without having any shield to trigger Super Sonic, press it while in the air to trigger Tails' or Knuckles' power (or turns you Super if you have more than 50 rings), and pressing it while in the air as Tails or Knuckles while having an elemental shield doesn't trigger the shield's power and only it's passive effects... Yuji Naka took this broken philosophy all the way up to Balloon Neverland even though at that point most people were used to playing platformers with 4 distinct face buttons for different functions. But due to playing Generations though, I instinctively held X for charging spin regardless. (X,A,B being A,B,C respectively)

Michael Jackson seemed to be an upgrade over Masato Nakamura to make pop music into chiptunes, but they sure didn't see whatever it is that was to come following it. Carnival Night Zone's song is out beaten by Mystic Cave for that circus music feel with its leitmotif, so I'm convinced that Nakamura wasn't replaced for 3 or anything as his tracks stand way higher than MJ's. Overall, apart from Carnival Night, all of his tracks feel very R&B/Soul and are a nice contrast to the more playful themes from Sonic 3 like Angel Island and Hydrocity. But no one is going to particularly miss these tracks since they are mostly just samples from some of Brad and Michael's previous works and because the rest of the Japanese tracks are great too if only made better in Sonic Mania's remixes.

I never got stuck in Sonic 3 until the Barrel of Doom in Carnival Zone. The clown music playing over and over again as I tried jumping on it made me feel insecure. I brought up the Steam Overlay, and right there in the Recommended Guides section, was the Barrel's image as the icon, and all I had to do was press Up and Down to swing it. The whole sensation could've been avoided if you weren't given positive reinforcement upon jumping (the barrel shouldn't have bounced) while Tails could have looked up and down to show us what needed to be done but instead, he didn't do anything in the way of guiding the player when I needed it the most.

I unknowingly kept trying to activate Super Sonic after zone 7 because I didn't know that the cutscene in Mushroom Hill made me relinquish my chaos emeralds. So I never played as SS in S3 and went straight into Hyper Sonic once I unlocked it, though I was still enjoying SS in Mania at the same time. I guess it's designed that way so that people who already unlocked SS in the first part would be forced to play without SS in the &Knuckles stages, otherwise, those levels would have been remembered as the stuff you flew past if they had just locked-on and continued (which you could've still done if you never entered the secret room). Hyper Sonic goes gamer RGB (at least following Genesis color palette) and gives him a blink/dash ability, yet again triggered with the same face button... so it's good that Mania forced transformations to the Y button so as to not interfere with every other mechanic tied to 'Jump'.

Knuckles Playthrough:

I didn't play as Tails in Sonic 3 because there's nothing different compared to playing Sonic apart from making the game easier (which I didn't need since I had Rewind on my fingertips) but playing as Knuckles is touted as the ultimate 'alternate playmode'. It is the next logical thing to try out after unlocking Hyper Sonic. Levels are slightly different, paths designed just for him to go through, and all the bosses have a robot sprite instead of Eggman denoting that this is happening alongside Sonic's adventure and Eggman has set up these robots to fight Knuckles as he is attending to Sonic. But unlike the GTA IV DLC, you never see the parts where Sonic and Knuckles' paths collide, along with further inconsistencies in the Master Emrald's story but I guess it's foreshadowing a franchise full of inconsistencies...

Also apparently Knuckles can break anything in his way by walking into it and doesn’t need to spindash like sonic. Even though I didn't like the Spinning Top gimmick among other things (and they brought that back in Generations' Sky Sanctuary level for some reason), Marble Garden Zone is way better to explore as Knuckles due to having extra unreachable paths with Big Rings times three that I was able to get in the very same run.

Super Knuckles is underwhelming compared to Sonic. His sprite just flashes white and just gives zero-traction physics like Super Sonic but it doesn't feel as power-trippy as Super Sonic. Hyper Knuckles (and Hyper Tails) on the other hand have perks so visually and mechanically superior that they are considered not canon.

Got stuck as Knuckles in Sandopolis during the part where you were supposed to keep the lever in place with the rock (that's because the trails of the platform were covered by the sand… so I didn't remember whether that was a movable block or not), which made it less fun compared to Marble Garden even though both were supposed to be labyrinths.

Zones:

The game Sonic Mania derived most of its zones from, as they thought most people would consider them as fresh ideas even today since many hadn't played this back in the day or have not been able to play it because Steam was the only place Sega put out this ROM on. Even though the idea for each act to have its own theme started in Sonic CD, it makes more sense here as you would be actually listening to all of it in 1 playthrough.

My Favorite Zones and Themes:
Flying Battery, Angel Island, Lava Reef, Hydrocity, Data Select, Staff Roll, The Doomsday Zone (for that climactic tension in the music), Icecap Zone (just the theme), and Blue Spheres (by far the only consistently decent special stage even though it has an input lag issue)

You needn't wait for Sonic Origins. 'Sonic 3 Complete' mod is available in the Steam Workshop. Or you can try Sonic 3 A.I.R. legally cause the ROM files are available to access in the local folder of the Sega Genesis Collection for you to patch it.

Journal:

I didn't mention it in my Sonic 1 review, and I doubt I'll have space for it in my Sonic 3 review; even though I got Sonic 2 for free back in 2020 for Sega's 60th-anniversary freebie, I had to buy Sonic 1 and 3K off-sale because they announced the delisting dates of all the pre-existing classic Sonic games from digital storefronts in order to make way for the release of their upcoming Sonic Origins Collection which has the widescreen ports of Sonic 1, 2, and CD along with a new port of Sonic 3K with Michael Jackson's music removed. To be fair, I wouldn't have bought and played these games immediately if it weren't for the looming threat along with Sonic Generations and Mania, all at the same time (switching between each other when I got bored of one or was itching to play another), all within a month and a half.

Tails the Fox was always a better side-kick than Luigi. He's always with us from Sonic 2 onwards, tagging along, getting crushed by everything in the level yet coming back flying with his tails, giving out hints as to what to do in certain sections, allowing little brothers around the world to control him without affecting their elder brothers' pace... he's adorable. He can't fly when playing him solo, so might as well just play Sonic + Tails or lock-on Knuckles with S&K.

Spin-Dash! Press Down, and mash Jump to rev up your wheel up to 6 ticks and let go for a burst of speed without needing to build up momentum. You can jump after a dash to reach places you couldn't before, destroy blockades, kill enemies along the way, or even bounce off an enemy to change your trajectory at will since you'll have great control of its speed and reach once you regularly use it.

Zones:


The fact that all 3 games had different ways to access special stages led to me ending up not knowing about Sonic 2's rather hidden/obscure Special Stage access point compared to the other games. I hadn't even collected a single chaos emerald during both my playthroughs as I never noticed the sparkles on the checkpoint (at least not as bad as not knowing Mania's drop-dash for 2 playthroughs either). Sonic 2 special stages are annoyingly stuttery and pixelated compared to Sonic 1 and 3 and you're constantly getting blindsided with turns. I wouldn't recommend playing this without Rewind for the original ROM emulation of this game (the remasters seem to have ironed it out to a playable state).

Disclaimer: I never played Super Mario World (only the NES one) but many of the features of the NES and SNES Mario titles were brought to New Super Mario Bros. which I played a lot when I was younger (all I'm saying is that I've been a Mario kid, and not a Sonic one, and these last 2 months have been the only time I've played Sonic games in my life). So in terms of a 16-bit comparison, I have no other benchmark to see if these games exceed or falter.

Sonic 1 is more of a platformer with puzzles rather than a Blast Processing simulator like 2, 3, and CD, with occasional Loop de Loops. It really does show its irrelevancy in that sense, especially with the lack of the Spin-Dash, which sucked for me since I played Sonic 2, Mania, and Generations before this and felt at many times the game was lacking a crucial mechanic (Though its focus was on building up momentum instead of giving you the instant gratification that comes with Spin-Dashes, everything felt slower overall.)

As long as you're in a ball, you deal damage (unless it's just after you touch the ground and you take damage to whatever is there). Even though the spin-dash is absent, you can do a sick quick-roll immediately in front of a badnik to take it out. Having these ROMs in widescreen could've been great as Sonic scrolls horizontally most of the time and seeing more of his upcoming obstacles definitely lets you react better.

Teabagging is by far the strongest in this game because there are fewer intermediate frames of animation for ducking, something that I did in this game as a fidgeting mechanism while waiting for platforms to slowly come to me.

There are no Saves in Sonic 1 or 2, so you end up repeating Green Hill over and over again whenever you decide to pop in Sonic 1, without ever revisiting Spring Yard and Star Light Zones because of the pace breaking stages in between them making you want to end your run. You gotta rely on savestates in the emulator (where you get up to 4 slots for each game on the Genesis and Megadrive Collection), so it's advised to place a save upon reaching each quarter of the game to keep a permanent memory of your playthrough.

There are only 7 zones here, just like Sonic CD, but each of them has been dragged out to 3 acts, with the third one mainly being a boss fight in its second half, which is a far cry from the variety seen in Sonic 2 and 3K in the future. I like the music of every Zone apart from Marble Garden and the Final Zone, and they're just gonna keep getting better.

The sound effects for stuff like blades spinning or boulders breaking always irritated me. It always felt like the genesis couldn't reproduce that sound well enough and was instead spitting profusely at me. (it sometimes sounds even worse than the fire-spitting sound effect from Bowser in the first NES Mario game)

it's good that Sega gave away Sonic 2 instead of 1 back during their 60th anniversary, cause if I had started with this game instead, I would've probably dropped it after the first zone and gone on believing the lies about Sonic never being a good franchise.



I tried Sonic CD before it got delisted but refunded it because the uncapped framerate made the physics too wonky to play with (game speed was more than doubled). Mania redid the best parts of CD anyways, so I didn't have any regrets about not being able to beat Metal Sonic at the end of the 2nd last stage which I reached by flying through all the bad futures without a care in the world to fix Little Planet cause I was fed up of initiating a time travel as soon as I hit top speed after passing a sign accidentally.

Sega definitely beat Nintendo at shifting from chiptune music to higher bitrate CD-quality soundtracks with voices and stuff for Sonic CD (especially the weird, quirky kind with the JP soundtrack), and even though Nintendo beat them to the adaptive soundtrack race, I feel that for replay listens, Sega's approach for overhauling the Zone themes with contextual remixes was better than adding a Bongo track onto Mario soundtracks when you sit on Yoshi. The beeps and boops of the Genesis sound more like rock music compared to the SNES' softer but heavier music. Even though 1 and 2 are pop music, 3 is pop-rock; CD is the most experimental with its 90s SFX mash-ups.

Sonic CD has the same number of zones as Sonic 1, which also might explain how CD is more of a supplement to Sonic 1 rather than a sequel that defeats it in every category. Metal Sonic's appearance, in-game, and external promotional material with all the animated shorts and renders were all adding up to it being my favorite antagonist in the series, even more than Knuckles, even though he had more interaction with the player in the game that he was in; and it helped keep that abomination of a creation an elusive entity throughout.

I wish every game and application ran on savestates so I could easily rewind them like in Life is Strange and this game for screenshot-taking purposes. Pausing still counts as time wasted for rewind though. Quick-save and quick-load (using the right joystick) went underused from me since rewind goes several minutes back anyways, but I guess it could be useful for longer stretches and for games other than platformers.

3D 90s kid room... sure? I guess there's the simple launcher if you want to avoid that, but you lose a couple of features like achievements, Workshop mods, and the option to rewind.

It's tricky to load a file and make it full screen without accidentally overwriting the save file on a controller because the control prompts for saving and loading are interchanged/different each time you put the game in from the library, resume it from the TV, in the pause menu, etc.

Another irritable experience I had was that even though my display was 16:10, the application ran at 16:9 for me by default and since most games were 4:3, I had horizontal and vertical black bars as it didn't utilize the extra height of my display. The setting to fix that wasn't part of the 'emulator settings' and instead was sectioned off in the 'room settings'. The Input and Emulator settings are right in the center of the 3D room, but 'Room Settings' was hidden all the way off-screen in the far-right corner of the room... (exaggerated a bit for dramatic effect) But I didn't even notice this until much later on, which is why half of my screenshots have a wider border while the other half don't: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gaklimited/screenshots/?appid=34270

I didn't change the perspective grid border because it was the least distracting one even compared to the pure black one because I would have had 4 black bars instead of just 2 if I were to pick the black border at the time.

Upcoming Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic 3&Knuckles, Sonic Generations, and Sonic Mania reviews back to back as this was just the review of the emulator :P

It's irritating really... These types of games are only relevant in the era they come out, and the 'new content' they've added does help steer it to mocking the current gaming climate as the original did in 2013 for its time. So it would almost make sense for it to actually come out every couple of years with sequels updating its references to suit the state of the future gaming industry, but that idea would be completely ironic given the fact that all of the 'new content' in this remaster was making fun at that concept. See? I'm repeating myself, talking faff over and over again, trying to find new words in the thesaurus to state the same point over and over again, trying to use my limited vocabulary to try to mark the point that makes the most impact onto whoever is re-


WHAT WAS THE POINT OF THE STUPID BUCKET??!! Literally, half of the 'new content' was just an alternate narration with the narrator cheesing in info about the bucket while actions from the original version took place... I know it's ironic, and that's why whatever I say might be sounding like a r/whoooosh, but the issue still stands that this was the update, all they did was move the game from Source to Unity, and created content intentionally designed in a way that complaining about the update makes you the butt of the joke because of the intense levels of irony at play. The bucket was just a meaningless inanimate object like the Portal companion cube or-


The expectation of getting rewarded for waiting makes this game dreadful... because sometimes you do, and sometimes you don't... You don't know when waiting pays off and when it doesn't... So sometimes the narrator isn't able to catch up to you, and sometimes waiting triggers special dialogue... The game really needs an auto-skip feature like the ones present in visual novels where previously presented dialogue isn't repeated.

After playing this, you might be burnt out of meme games for a while though, the skip thing at the very start made me actually start hating the narrator's voice a bit, just like anyone reading this will start to hate hearing my fake philosophical conjecture and realize that it has always been faff.

The aesthetic and attitude of everything that was going on in this game was just a mockery of super-serious stories in gaming. It did come off as petty coming from a big publisher like Ubisoft because it sounded like a jag at other big publishers like Activision. The song 'Power Core' from the soundtrack is pretty memorable compared to that one track from Far Cry 3 but in other aspects such as cutscenes and main campaign content, the previous game was obviously superior. Chain killing was more fun in Blood Dragon though with its slicker animations and neon-bloody finishers.

Pros'n'Cons:

• 80's feel with a 00's comedic take.
  
• Rex sounds like a person trying to impersonate Schwarzenegger without realizing he's german (like Daniel Lazarski from >Observer_).
  
• Since it can't connect to the servers, it keeps holding me hostage every time I press Esc.
  
• Even though it's presented as a standalone game, it is definitely an expansion of Far Cry 3 because it doesn't make you get the more basic skills from FC3 over again (like self-heals, death from above, shoot after takedowns, etc)
  
• Animals just give you money instead is crafting parts, clearly showing you that they don't want you to bother slowly building up your inventory again (except for weapon attachments) and just have full access cause it's supposed to be an expansion.
  
• No fall damage like the Borderlands games (though many games don't have fall damage, I don't know why I specifically mentioned Borderlands, but who cares I guess)
  
• The self-heal animations are so cool.
  
• The dragons were meant to be a persistent threat in the game, but also a helping tool, but like everything in Far Cry 3, bend your knees and you're invisible to everyone even without any cover.
  
• There is an ever-present CRT filter unless you manage to glitch out of it, giving you a clean image for the duration it is active...
  
• Putting out the fire and healing are on the same button, both uninterruptible actions unless someone else interrupts you.
  
• No radio towers, just outposts, but since they're very Indoors-ey unlike FC3, you have better stealth and chain-takedown potential, especially with the shuriken throw.
  
• The skill-ups like health increase and ability to take down heavys happened in the background as I got story and outpost progression because I didn't have them in the start (I only realized later on that you get a linear set of new skills every time you level up).
  
• I keep the LMG in my 4th slot instead of a shotgun to deal with the occasional time I have to fight a dragon and spray on its chest (they weren't as persistent or common a threat as they made it out to be at the start)... Plus I had 99 cyber hearts at all times from doing takedowns (which auto-loots the body without needing to watch the long and repetitive collection animation), so I threw them around without worrying about managing them.
  
• Unlike Far Cry 3, I did all the side missions and pimped up my gear before tackling the main story because the map was visibly smaller and hence more palatable.

Journal:

I didn't play Watch Dogs for a long time since I first installed it in 2019 because it didn't have Steam Achievements, and was hoping that they would add them in the future as they did with GTA4 and several EA games. So I never touched any of the Ubisoft games that I had bought. But since I was watching the final season of Better Call Saul this month, where I had watched the prior seasons unknowing of the fact that Nacho Varga was Vaas from Far Cry 3, I thought I owed it to myself to start this game even though I was a bit miffed that I'd only be getting Uplay achievements.

So Uplay, or as it's called at the time of writing this review, 'Ubisoft Connect' had given away a free version of Far Cry 3 which I claimed after I had already owned the Deluxe Edition on Steam, only I didn't know that it would end up creating 2 different instances of the same game on Ubisoft's Launcher, on top of which you needed to copy a key shown in your account information page and paste it in the 'Redeem Code' section in-game in order to activate the Deluxe content namely the 'Collector's Edition'.

Review:

• Since Vaas is Nacho Varga from Better Call Saul, there are technically 2 Far cry villains from the Breaking Bad franchise now.
  
• Taking screenshots sometimes crashes the game due to some DirectX tomfoolery.
  
• First-person driving is awkward just like in Dying Light, but at least the nighttime is well-lit and doesn't make it a pitch-black nightmare where you couldn't survive without the flashlight being on at all times unlike the latter (the flashlight is automatic when entering dark caves anyways).
  
• I like the camera a lot, for zooming and tagging without needing to hold down a scope. The fact that it's a full DSLR, unlike hitman 3's pocket camera is cool but there is no way to hide the menu/use it as a photo mode with 'taking pictures' not really saving the shots to a folder on Windows.
  
• The first thing I did was skin animals for better inventory. I maxed out everything before I continued the story because I didn't want it to get in my way cause I've had horrors of managing limited inventories in other games before...
  
• Sliding off of steep cliffs isn't a glitchy mechanic like in other games where you to cheese the fall damage. In fact, there's an intended mechanic where you slide down without taking damage, indicated by a sound effect. Also, remember this when climbing cliffs: where there's grass, stand on it you can.
  
• Crouching is too OP. The amount of sh*t you could get away with just by crouching felt weird, but I guess it's similar to Master Mode in Hitman. Though the AI alert logic didn't make too much sense either since it wasn't as clearly defined as the latter with respect to dealing with seeing a body lying around and not triggering the alarm.

A law for Ubisoft games: ignore the side content and just play the game on medium difficulty. The budget difference between the main and side content is very apparent just by looking at the models, animations, and voice acting from any of the NPCs that aren't part of the main campaign. You won't need the extra XP from side missions to make the game easier if you just played at a lower difficulty to begin with. Playing the main story with the slightly lesser XP will bring up the challenge in its own way. Play a game for what it's known to be good for, which in this case is the story of Jason and Vaas and not the copy-and-paste content that dilutes the core of Jason's mental progression.

Things to focus on in the game include:

Ubisoft towers from Breath of the Wild (or vice versa): They are both just puzzles at the end of the day, giving you the reward of verticality and map information upon reaching its top. I feel like there was more variation in Far cry only because I used Revali's gale far too many times to skip portions of the puzzle in BOTW.

Outposts are great and since this is the first and only Far Cry game I've played so far, the novelty hasn't worn off for me. You can either go guns blazing (which I never try because a mob of pirates is stronger than one), you can personally sneak into the compound like a crouching Hitman and silently takedown opponents one by one by distracting them with your stones, hiding their bodies and turning off the alarm in case you think it would be seen (SASO), or you can snipe everyone with a Sniper-SASO rating from a vantage point, undetected. It's more fun to go guns-blazing in Just Cause 3 on the other hand (which is also an open-world game with outpost-control mechanics), but with the added benefit of flashy grappling-wingsuit gameplay with means of external destruction compared to Far Cry 3, which encourages stealth more. (though you can further strengthen the similarity between the Just Cause and Far Cry franchise with its focus on the villain being the main differentiating point between its sequels though only having said villains show up for a fraction of the respective games' runtimes.)

Even if my stealth failed in the middle, I didn't feel too bad as long as I had taken care of the alarms so I wouldn't have to fight the extra enemies that would end up showing up and taking more time.

The game keeps telling you to hold Q to heal, but you just need to press it. I get anxious and hold it like my life depended on it to start the healing, kind of like I'm pressing against a deep wound to prevent further blood loss.

As of this review, I had finished the main campaign, a couple of extra crafting upgrade tasks, all outposts and radio towers, all but 2 skills remaining to unlock, and 1 co-op map (and partially through the second one, but online lobbies in 2022 will only have a full team at the highest difficulty and I got too bored to play another Left4Dead-like mission with the slow pace that came with Insane difficulty that I felt like quitting halfway through).